-001 Phil Zheng Cai
An Advance for 60 Art Careers
Unrealized Proposal with Columbia MFA students 2025
On March 18, 2025, I was invited by the Columbia MFA students to submit a proposal for their 2025 Summer Student Show. The exhibition was slated to open in the summer of 2025 at a gallery space that contains 3 separate floors.
The Proposal for “An Advance for 60 Art Careers” was submitted on the same day.
Messages and emails indicating both strong opinions for and against the Proposal were subsequently received.
The Proposal was officially rejects on March 25, 2025.
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The Proposal:
Courtesy of Andrea Fraser and e-flux Notes.
The Procedure (Needs to be agreed by all participating artists):
All 60 participating students from the Columbia MFA program will initially asked to answer an anonymous survey to pool each and everyone in the cohort into three groups:
- The group that you believe will have the most financial success after graduation (commercial gallery artists, luxury good, lifestyles)
- The group that you believe will have the most academic success after graduation (biannual artists, teaching careers)
- The group that you believe will have the most contribution in voicing for communities after graduation (activists, community leaders, artist-run spaces)
Each participant is required to place themselves into one of the three, and there is no limit to the amount of people placed in each individual group. The cohort will therefore be divided into Group A, B, and C according to the most common opinion on them by their fellow students. The three levels of the Gallery will be divided and occupied precisely according to this arrangement.
Throughout the exhibition, Group A will be paying for all costs associated with the exhibition for the entirety of the cohort, such as renting the gallery, exhibition designs, hiring for attendants, and buying wines for the opening. Group B will be working closely with the curator in curating the exhibitions at all three levels. Group C will be responsible for all out-reach, press responsibilities, and setting up public programs during the exhibition, the cost of which paid by Group A.
A Brief Statement and Outlook:
“An Advance for 60 Art Careers” hints at the common perception of career advancements, but also literally depicts an ADVANCE, economically defined, sixty times in predicting everyone’s future position in the art world by the people that are most familiar with their corresponding practices. Instead of the individual works, the exhibition focuses more on the dynamics within the cohort which, in this special circumstance and ahead of time, is empowered to utilize the subjectively likely future outcome of everyone to leverage against their current status.
Drawing from Andrea Fraser’s “The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram,” the three groups and floors of artists will be bracketed by a seemingly all-encompasing rule. Nonetheless, the intricacies brought out by the actual exhibition would question the gap between reality and the Fraser diagram. For instance, the limited space on each floor analogizes the limited social resources on each sector when 35 out of the 60 artists are predicted to go down the commercial artist route. The limited wall space, as a consequence of not only their own choice, but also the preference of the public, pushes their works to show with very little room to survive. The financially-successful group’s payment for the entire cohort’s expense, as another example, serves as an advance for their predicted success which hasn’t materialized.
The MFA program is an education apparatus which grooms practices, but the dynamics within could function as a rehearsal for the cut-throat art world which was often dichotomized from the academic utopias. To wake up early comes at a cost. Are you ready to advance?
[Special thanks to Yshao Lin for the invitation to submit this proposal and voicing for it]
[Special thanks to Dahlia Bloomstone for bringing Andrea Fraser’s diagram to my attention over our studio visit]